Today, when we think about female pilots in the 1920s and ‘30s, we think about one woman, Amelia Earhart—like it was only her, like it was just Earhart, flying alone against the world. But that wasn’t the case at all.

In the time in which Earhart flew, other women were flying with her, forming a small squadron in the sky. They were just as bold as she was. And arguably some of them were even more skilled at flying than Earhart.

We’ve forgotten almost all of them now. In our quest to remember one great woman—Earhart—we’ve erased the others, failing to remember their battles, their losses, and everything they sacrificed to do the thing they loved.

Women have been flying since the time of the Wright brothers. The first woman flew in a public air meet in 1910. Newspapers accounts noted that the “grandstands thundered with applause” as 26-year-old Blanche Scott climbed into the cockpit that day “clad in bloomers and a sweater with her cap set at a jaunty angle.” Other women, including Harriet Quimby (the first licensed female pilot in the U.S.) and Bessie Coleman (the first African-American female pilot) made headlines too, briefly becoming famous, before each of them died young—in airplane crashes.

Flying was dangerous in the 1920s and ‘30s—and air racing, one of the most popular sports at the time, was even more perilous. Plane engines would stop without warning. Propeller blades would snap and break off in midflight—again, without warning. And sometimes wings, made of lightweight materials, like wood and fabric, would disintegrate or break off completely under the strain of hard flying, dooming pilots to crash. Such things could happen under perfect conditions. Flying in rain or fog was even more difficult. Planes often went missing, over the sea and even over land. Many of them would never be found again. Others would be found, but investigators could not explain what caused the planes to crash. To fly a plane, was to be daring. And to race one, was to be fearless and a little reckless. It was, many men believed, no place for a woman.

Male reporters loved writing stories about female pilots—and they loved mocking them too. Newspapers, written and edited almost exclusively by men at the time, coined cutesy and demeaning terms for the female pilots. They weren’t heroic aviators, according to the newspapers; they were Aviatrixes, Tomboys of the Sky, Sweethearts of the Air, Petticoat Pilots, or Ladybirds. Most of all, they were “girl fliers,” the most common term given to female pilots at the time. It was frustrating to the women, who wanted the same opportunities as the men and wished to be taken seriously. As Earhart put it in 1932, “We are still trying to get ourselves called just ‘pilots.’”

Amelia Earhart wasn’t the first woman to try to fly across the ocean. She was the sixth woman, actually. Four of the first five crashed into the sea and disappeared; the other one crashed into the sea and lived. It was only because of their failures that Earhart got the chance to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in June 1928. But the men in charge of the historic flight didn’t want her actually flying. Earhart’s only job was to sit and take notes so that she could publish a book about the transatlantic trip—if they made it across.

The women got their biggest break one year later in 1929. For the first time, they were allowed to compete in the National Air Races, flying across the country in an all-female transcontinental race. It was called the National Women’s Air Derby, but newspapers began calling it the Powder Puff Derby, mocking the women yet again. The 20 women competing in the race were determined to make it from Santa Monica, California, to Cleveland without anyone crashing, without anyone dying—to prove a point. It didn’t work out that way.

The female pilots knew they needed to stick together and organize. They did just that in late 1929, inviting the nation’s 117 licensed female pilots to join a new organization—by women pilots, for women pilots. Ninety-nine women replied. And the group had its name. The Ninety-Nines still exists today.

Earhart soon had both friends and rivals in the air. She grew close with Louise Thaden, a record-setting pilot from Arkansas, and she battled for years in the sky against Ruth Nichols, the daughter of Wall Street wealth in New York. Both Nichols and Earhart wanted to be the first woman to fly—solo—across the ocean. By 1931, Nichols felt sure she would get there first.

Women at the time struggled to get hired in real aviation jobs. In 1933, the Ninety-Nines finally surveyed airlines and airplane manufacturers to find out why. Aviation executives bluntly reported that they only wanted to hire women for “routine perfunctory duties”—like answering phones, taking dictation or sewing parachutes. Anything else, one executive noted, was out of the question due to “the fact that most women have insufficient mechanical ability and little desire to observe and learn.”

Women disagreed, believing they could fly just as well as any man—if given the chance. In late 1934, one of them finally got hired as a pilot at Central Airlines. It did not go well. The pilots’ union refused to accept her and aviation officials wouldn’t let her fly passengers in bad weather. Within months, the female pilot quit. It would be almost 40 years—1973—before a major airline again hired another woman to be a pilot.

Today the ranks of female pilots are growing. Women represent about seven percent of all pilots in the U.S. Studies show they are just as safe as men, maybe even safer. And airlines today, facing a serious pilot shortage, would happily welcome a woman to the cockpit. But it was the early pioneers who first made flight possible for women, pushing on into an angry headwind. “We knew that the men looked down on us,” Louise Thaden said late in life. But it didn’t matter, she added, because they believed in themselves. “You knew what you could do.”

AMG/Parade Digital

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